My cousin Jason leaned over my chair at Laverne’s birthday, right in front of my son, and said, “Can you even fight, or did the Army just have you file paperwork?” I told him bare-knuckle mostly, and he laughed and asked if they’d named me Cupcake. I said one word, and across the deck an old Marine let his drink fall.
The tumbler hit the flagstone and burst, and every voice on that deck quit at once.
Bourbon ran into the cracks between the stones.
Ice skidded under a lawn chair.
Forty-some relatives swung around toward the noise.
Nobody would have guessed it was Wendell.
He’d stood by the smoker all evening, steady as a fence post.
He never glanced at the mess around his shoes.
His eyes were on me.
Whatever had drained the color from his cheeks had nothing to do with a spilled drink.
He looked like a man reading down a list of the dead and finding one of them sitting in a lawn chair with a lemonade.
Right then I’d have given anything to be two hours away on my own couch.
Laverne’s birthday filled the whole yard down to the water.
Little cousins ran barefoot through the sprinkler with freeze pops dripping down their wrists, somebody’s speaker played the same six country songs off the porch rail, and the ribs had been going since dawn.
She’d called me ten days before.
“Stephanie, honey, I’m seventy-nine,” she said. “Bring that boy. I want a picture with him while I can still stand up for one.”
There was no turning her down.
So I made her banana pudding in the glass dish she gave me the week I enlisted, buckled Ryder into the back seat, and drove out to her lake house outside Hot Springs.
I told myself we’d eat, sing, and be gone before dark.
Ryder made me take a selfie with him on the dock before we’d even said hello.
Two missing front teeth and a sunburned nose.
The plan held for about twenty minutes.
Then Jason spotted me.
Since third grade, Jason had treated every gathering like a stage built just for his voice.
These days he sold pontoon boats at a marina and treated every cookout like a showroom floor.
Whatever he was drinking, somebody topped it off before it ran dry.
“WELL, LOOK WHO IT IS,” he said, across the whole lawn. “Uncle Sam’s little secret finally crawled out of her bunker.”
A couple of the older women laughed the way you laugh at a waiter’s joke.
I kissed Laverne’s cheek, passed over the pudding dish, and gave Jason nothing to work with.
Ryder held onto the hem of my shirt and stared at him.
Jason couldn’t stand being ignored.
Quiet only made him dig.
Every twenty minutes or so he circled back to where I sat.
“Still cashing that VA check?”
“No.”
“Find yourself regular work yet?”
“Yes.”
“Still carry one of those Army pistols in your PURSE?”
“No.”
Each one-word answer seemed to tickle him more.
At the food table he saluted me with a rib bone, then faked tripping over his own feet, and his kids howled.
“Careful,” he told them. “She’ll put you in a headlock.”
Ryder didn’t laugh.
On the walk to the bathroom he asked me why Jason kept making fun of me.
I said some grown-ups get loud when they don’t know what to do with their hands.
He thought about that and didn’t buy it.
Around six, one more guest pulled in.
A dark gray pickup crept up the gravel, and a gray-haired man climbed down in pressed khakis and a collared shirt buttoned to the throat, September sun or not.
He said his name was Wendell Brauer.
He’d known my uncle Christopher from the VFW for thirty years.
Retired Marine.
People who’ve served clock each other across a yard.
The spine.
The stillness.
The way the eyes find every gate and door before the body sits down.
Wendell worked his way down the deck shaking hands.
When he got to me, his grip held a beat too long.
He squinted slightly, like he was matching a face to a voice off an old radio.
He let go and moved on.
So did I.
I figured that was the end of it.
By the time the porch lights came on, Jason had pulled a crowd around the cooler.
Beer turned his volume up.
This beer was no different.
He strolled over to my corner of the deck holding a fresh longneck.
“Go on and enlighten the family,” Jason called out, loud enough to turn heads down by the rail. “Nine years wearing camo, what was your actual job?”
“Little bit of everything.”
He snorted.
“THAT TELLS US NOTHING.”
“It’s what I’ve got.”
Two of the uncles grinned into their paper plates.
Then Jason crouched down to Ryder’s height.
“Your mama tell you she was some kind of hero, bud?” he said. “Bet she typed up forms in a trailer the whole time.”
Ryder turned and studied me.
He didn’t laugh this time either.
His mouth went flat, the way it does when a bigger kid takes his ball.
Jason stood back up, pleased with himself.
“You ever see combat?”
“Some.”
“Shoot anybody?”
“Fired my rifle when ordered.”
“Ever scrap with somebody?”
He put both fists up like a boxer on a cereal box.
“You know…”
He chopped the air in slow motion.
“…the UP-CLOSE stuff.”
Any other day, I’d have laughed and asked him about boats.
Any other day, I liked being underestimated.
It’s cheaper than explaining.
But it had been five hours, and my son was sitting beside me waiting to find out who his mother was.
I lowered my lemonade.
“Yes.”
Jason blinked.
“For real?”
“Close-quarters, mostly.”
I lifted one shoulder.
“Bare hands came with the job.”
His grin got wider.
“Knives?”
“When they were needed.”
The crowd around the cooler cracked up.
Jason smacked his own thigh.
“CALLED IT.”
He jabbed the bottle in my direction.
“Then what nickname did your platoon stick you with?”
He let it sit a second, smirking at the cousins first so they’d be ready.
“CUPCAKE?”
Ryder’s hand found my sleeve.
I kept my eyes on Jason a long moment.
Then I told him, flat, like I was reading him tomorrow’s forecast.
“Banshee.”
The word was barely out when the glass hit the stone.
Wendell’s bourbon.
His skin went the gray of cold ashes.
The eyes he turned on me belonged to a much younger man.
His mouth opened.
For a few seconds nothing came out but air.
When he finally spoke, it was so quiet I nearly missed it.
“Lord have mercy…”
“…YOU’RE BANSHEE.”
Glass on the flagstone
Nobody on that deck moved, so I did.
There were barefoot kids everywhere, and a broken tumbler doesn’t care whose birthday it is.
I set my lemonade on the arm of the chair and went to pick up the big pieces.
Ryder came with me. He wouldn’t let go of my sleeve, so I did it one-handed.
Wendell got down beside me. His knees popped like a cheap card table.
“Ramadi,” he said. “Two thousand five. I had the radio at the Marine post a mile up the road from your gate.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I called you all night.” He picked a chip of glass off the toe of his shoe and looked at it like he’d never seen glass before. “You answered every time but the last.”
I had a curved piece of his tumbler in my palm, edge out, the way I hold anything I don’t trust yet.
“Mama,” Ryder said. “Who is he?”
“He used to talk to me on the radio, baby.”
“When?”
“Before you.”
That was as far as I got.
Behind us the cooler lid banged, and Jason came across the deck in his daddy’s old VFW cap, the one with the pins down the side. He’d worn it since noon. Uncle Christopher never once wore it to a table.
Jason had quit laughing. He was doing math, and Jason has always hated math. He sells boats on payments for a reason.
“Hold on,” he said. “HOLD ON. Banshee?”
He looked at the cooler crowd, then at the birthday chair, where his mother sat in a paper crown one of the great-grandkids had colored for her.
“Mama,” he said. “That’s Daddy’s story.”
Laverne set her plate down on the flagstone, the way you do right before you stand up and slap somebody.
Sixteen Thanksgivings
Everybody in that family knew the Banshee story.
Half of them could have told it with their mouths full, and most years somebody did.
Uncle Christopher brought it home from the VFW one Friday in 2008 and told it every Thanksgiving after that until the spring he died. He never put a name on it. “A Marine at the Post told me this,” he’d say, and that was all you got. Chris thought names were what ruined a good war story.
He’d get to the part about the truck, and his voice would go, and Laverne would hand him a napkin, and the whole table would wait for him.
I sat at that table for nearly every one of them. I passed the rolls.
Last Thanksgiving, Jason told it instead.
He stood up between the turkey and the sweet potatoes in that same cap and did the Marine on the radio in a growl like a truck commercial. He did the gate. He did the truck. He said the Marine kept her talking all night so she wouldn’t nod off, “and Daddy said nobody ever knew what about.” He said there were two girls on that gate, “and neither one of them came home, God rest them.”
Then he did the scream.
The kids shrieked and loved it. Laverne cried for Chris into a napkin with a turkey on it. Ryder asked me if it was true.
I said, “Eat your pie.” Then I went out and sat in my car with the heater running until the windows fogged.
Now that same cap was standing on the deck with a longneck in its hand.
Forty-some people looked from Jason to me to the old man with bourbon on his shoes.
On the food table behind them sat my banana pudding in Laverne’s glass dish, about half gone. She gave me that dish the week I enlisted. She’d stuck a strip of masking tape on the bottom with her name on it in marker and said, “Bring it back to me full.” The tape is still there, gone the color of weak tea. I have never once brought that dish back to her empty.
What I wanted right then was small. I wanted my son to hear who his mother was from somebody who wasn’t doing a voice.
What I got was Jason, grinning with every tooth he owned.
“So which one are you, Steph?” he said. “The dead one, or the other dead one?”
Two girls on a gate
Somebody by the rail laughed, then quit, because nobody knew yet which way this was going.
Jason knew. Jason always knows. It’s the best thing about him at a boat show.
“Y’all want to know what happened here?” He swung around to the whole deck. “She sat at Daddy’s table sixteen years and heard that story every November. She knows it better than I do. Then she sits through five hours of me ribbing her, and she needs a big finish.”
“Jason,” I said.
“So she pulls the one word out of Daddy’s story she knows will get a reaction.” He tipped his bottle at Wendell. “No offense, Mr. Brauer.”
Missy, his wife, was down at the dessert end with a paper plate of my pudding. She licked the spoon and said, “Steph always did like being the mysterious one.”
Missy has eaten my pudding at every holiday for nineteen years. In nineteen years she has asked me one question about my life, and it was about my bangs.
Wendell pushed himself up off his heels. “Son, I know that voice.”
“Sir, you heard a voice on a radio in a war twenty-one years ago,” Jason said. “And with all respect, you just dropped a full glass of Mama’s good bourbon on her new patio.”
That got a laugh, a real one. Wendell’s ears went red to the tips.
I wanted to put Jason through the porch screen. I’d have enjoyed it. It would also have proved every word he’d said since two o’clock, and Laverne would have had to pick screen out of her azaleas on her birthday.
So I said, “Ryder, go find your shoes.”
“No,” Ryder said.
That boy has never said no to me in front of people in his life. He stood on the wet flagstone in his bare feet with an ice cube melting beside his toe and looked straight up at Jason.
“You said she typed forms,” he said.
“I did, bud. And I think your mama’s still typing.” Jason winked at the cooler. “Typing up a whole new story.”
He patted his shirt pocket. Wendell’s deposit check was in there. Wendell had come by the marina Thursday and put two thousand dollars down on a twenty-two-foot pontoon, $41,800 sticker. Jason hadn’t deposited it yet. He’d brought it to his mother’s birthday to pass around the cooler like a fish he’d caught, which tells you most of what you need to know.
“Tell you what,” he said. “Banshee was a hero. Daddy cried over her every year. You want to wear a dead girl’s name in front of your boy, you go clear it with my mama.”
Then he tipped his head back and did the scream.
The paper crown
It was eleven steps from the smoker to Laverne’s chair. I counted, the way you count anything when the other choice is yelling.
Ryder walked every one of them with me.
Laverne had a plate on her knees she hadn’t touched. The crown was crooked. One of the great-grandkids had written LAVERNE 79 on it in purple marker, run out of room, and sent the 9 up the side.
I knelt by her chair. The stone was wet there, and my knee went right down in the bourbon.
“Aunt Laverne.”
“Was it you?” she said.
I have been asked hard questions by men holding rifles. This was worse. She had her reading glasses on.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She took the glasses off and folded them in her lap.
“You were in Iraq that year.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you sat at my table.” Her voice climbed. “Sixteen Thanksgivings, Stephanie. Chris cried over those girls at every one. I’d hand him a napkin, and you’d pass the rolls.”
“I know.”
“If it was you, then you let him.” She was crying now, the mad kind, with her chin up. “You let a grieving old man grieve, and you sat there and buttered your roll.”
“He wasn’t grieving me.”
“Then who was he grieving?”
I didn’t answer her. Not on a deck. Not with forty people holding paper plates and the porch speaker starting the same six songs over from the top.
She put her glasses back on. That’s how I knew we were done.
“Jason,” she said, loud enough for the yard. “Get Mr. Brauer some water. And somebody find a broom.”
Jason was already there with the water. Of course he was. He set it down at Wendell’s elbow on the bench and rubbed the old man’s shoulder the way he rubs a customer’s shoulder after the customer sees the price.
Ryder had my sleeve again. He yanked it.
“Tell her,” he said.
Laverne looked at him. For a second her mouth went soft, the way it did when he was a baby and she’d hold him on this deck in a beach towel. Then she patted my hand on her armrest.
“Take your boy home before it gets full dark, honey,” she said. “Like you planned.”
A glass of water
The broom came. A teenage cousin swept around Wendell’s shoes while he sat on the bench with his water and didn’t drink it.
Jason didn’t let him sit long.
He pulled a lawn chair up in front of the old man, turned it around backwards, and straddled it. Kids came to see. Missy came with her plate. He had the cooler crowd and the dessert crowd now, and you could see in his face how good that felt.
“Mr. Brauer,” he said. “Help me out. Couple quick questions.”
It was the same way he’d come at me all day. I knew the rhythm. I’d been answering it since two o’clock.
“You ever see Banshee’s face?”
Wendell looked at his water. “No.”
“Not once?”
“It was a radio, son.”
“They tell you what happened to her?”
“They told me both women at that gate were killed.”
“Both of them.”
“That’s what they told me.”
Jason spread his hands over the back of the chair like a man showing you a boat with nothing wrong with it.
“So what you’ve got,” he said, “is a voice on a radio twenty-one years ago. And one word my cousin heard at my daddy’s table about forty times.”
Then he turned to me, over by Laverne’s chair, and pointed with his chin.
“Mr. Brauer. Is that her?”
Wendell looked at me for a long time.
I let him. I stood there with my wet knee and my son on my sleeve and let a man I’d only ever met in the dark try to find me in the porch light.
“I thought so,” he said. “I don’t know, son. I’m sixty-eight. I thought so.”
His voice broke on the last word. I’d have taken a punch in the mouth over that.
“There it is,” Jason said.
Missy said, “Oh, Jase, leave the poor man alone,” but she was smiling when she said it, and two of the uncles laughed into their beers.
I could have told it right then. The truck, the gate, the man who came through after the truck, and what my hands did about him.
I’d have had to say Tori’s name on a deck with a sprinkler going and freeze pops melting on the steps.
So I went to the food table. I put the foil back over the pudding. I picked up Laverne’s dish.
Laverne didn’t look at me. She stared out toward open water.
“Drive safe, Cupcake,” Jason said, and the cooler laughed with him all the way down the yard.
Ryder walked beside me barefoot. He didn’t hold my sleeve this time. He held his shoes against his chest with both hands.
I buckled him in. I set the dish on the car roof to dig out my keys.
He was crying the quiet way, the way I taught him without meaning to.
“Mama,” he said. “Did you make it up?”
I shut his door.
Masking tape
I stood by the car with my keys in my hand.
Through the window, Ryder had his forehead on the glass. Up the yard somebody turned the music back up, which is what my family does instead of praying.
I took the dish off the roof and turned it over.
Laverne’s name was on the bottom in marker, on tape gone brown as a paper sack. Twenty-five years that tape had held on.
I opened Ryder’s door.
“Put your shoes on,” I said. “We’re going back.”
He had them on before I finished.
We came back up the lawn the long way, past the sprinkler, straight through the middle of all of them. The cooler crowd quit laughing one at a time, like lights going off down a hall.
“Forget something, Cupcake?” Jason said.
I walked past him like he was a lawn chair.
Wendell was still on the bench. I set Laverne’s dish on the table in front of him and peeled the foil back.
“Three in the morning,” I said. “You asked me what I was going to eat first when I got home.”
His hand stopped on the water glass.
Up on the porch rail, somebody turned the speaker off.
“I said my aunt’s banana pudding. Out of the glass dish she gave me the week I left. I said she made me promise to bring it back to her full.”
Nobody on that deck said a word. The sprinkler went tick, tick, tick across the grass.
“You said, ‘Then you get home and you fill it. And you save a Marine a spoon.'” I swallowed. “I said I was Army. You said, ‘Not tonight you’re not.'”
Wendell set his water down. He put both hands flat on the table on either side of that dish, and then his shoulders went, and he put his face down in his hands.
“I never told that part,” he said into them. “Not to one living soul. Not even Chris.”
“I know. That part was mine.”
He lifted his head. “They told me both of you.”
“Tori was killed. She was twenty.” I kept my eyes on him, because that was the only place I could keep them. “I went out on a helicopter and spent the next year in a back brace.”
Behind me, Laverne made a sound like somebody had stepped on her foot.
“Uncle Chris was crying for Tori,” I said. “So was I. I just did mine in the car.”
Laverne got up out of her birthday chair. It took her two tries and the armrest. She came across the wet stone in her house shoes, picked the dish up in both hands, and turned it over.
She put her thumb on her own name.
Down at his height
“Okay,” Jason said. “Okay. Hold on now.”
Nobody held on. That was new for him.
“How was anybody supposed to know that?” He came around the bench with his hands out. “She SAT there. Sixteen years she sat there and let Daddy cry, and she never said one word, and that’s on ME? That’s on HER. I’m the one kept Daddy’s story going. Me. Somebody had to.”
He turned to the cooler crowd. They were all suddenly very interested in their paper plates.
“Y’all heard me all day. I rib everybody. I ribbed half of you about your hair at Easter. Missy. Tell her it was a cookout.”
Missy set her plate on the rail. “You did the scream, Jase,” she said. “At her.”
He looked at his wife like she’d sold his truck out from under him.
Then he went to Wendell, because Wendell was the last friendly face he had, and Jason has never once walked away from a sale.
“Mr. Brauer. Wendell. Come on. You didn’t know either. You said so yourself.”
Wendell stood up. He was a head shorter than Jason and about forty years past fighting shape, and Jason backed up a step anyway.
“I need my check back, son.”
“Now hold on. That’s business. That’s got nothing to do with—”
Wendell held out his hand and left it there.
“Thirty years you knew Daddy,” Jason said. “Thirty years. And you’re going to do me like this over one word?”
“Over twenty-one years,” Wendell said.
Jason took the check out of the pocket he’d been patting all night. Wendell tore it in half, then in half again, and dropped the four pieces in the bourbon on the flagstone, right where the broom had missed.
“I’ll buy my boat in Malvern,” he said.
“That’s a forty-one-thousand-eight-hundred-dollar boat, Wendell.”
“I can count.”
Jason turned to his mother. His voice went up into the place it used to go when he was ten and had broken something in her kitchen.
“Mama.”
Laverne still had the dish against her chest. She handed it to me without looking. Then she held her other hand out to her son.
“Give me your daddy’s hat.”
“Mama, come on—”
“Give it here.”
He took it off. His hair was flat and sweaty underneath, and he looked about twelve.
“Your daddy told that story sixteen years,” she said, “with the girl it happened to sitting at his table. And you stood up in his hat and screamed it at her. In front of her boy.”
“I didn’t KNOW.”
“You didn’t ask. You had five hours, and you asked her if she carried a pistol in her purse.”
“It was a JOKE, Mama, it was all just a—”
“Get down there.”
She pointed. Not at me. At Ryder.
Jason looked around. His own two kids were on the steps with their freeze pops. Every face on that deck was on him, and not one of them was laughing.
He got down. Same crouch as before, right at Ryder’s height, his hands on his knees.
For a while he didn’t say anything. Ryder waited. Ryder is good at waiting. He gets that from me.
“Your mama,” Jason said. He stopped. He started again. “Your mama didn’t type forms, bud. She’s Banshee. She’s the one in the story.”
“You said she was dead,” Ryder said.
“I was wrong.”
“You were loud,” Ryder said.
Wendell laughed, one bark like a seal, and put his hand over his mouth.
Up on the steps, Jason’s oldest took the freeze pop out of her mouth. “Daddy,” she said. “Is she really Banshee?”
Jason didn’t turn around. “Yeah, baby,” he said. “She really is.”
Laverne didn’t laugh. “Thanksgiving’s at my house,” she said. “You’ll come. You’ll bring the rolls. And you won’t tell that story at my table again.”
“Mama, it’s Daddy’s—”
“It’s hers.”
Jason stood up. He looked at me with the dish in my arms like I’d taken something from him. I suppose I had.
“You could’ve just told me,” he said.
“I said yes.”
Missy picked the kids’ shoes up off the steps. On her way past she stopped. “Your pudding’s good, Steph,” she said. “I never said.”
She held out her hand for his keys, and Jason got in on the passenger side.
The dock
Jason’s truck pulled out at 8:52. Missy drove. Both kids rode in the back with their shoes in their laps.
His daddy’s cap stayed on Laverne’s knee.
Wendell’s check stayed in four pieces in the bourbon until a teenage cousin swept it up with the glass.
The twenty-two-footer stayed on the lot at the marina, sticker and all.
Nobody turned the music back on.
Laverne sat down in her birthday chair and pulled me down in front of her by both wrists, the way she used to haul me in off the dock when I was too stubborn to come up for supper.
“I said terrible things to you,” she said.
“You said them at your own party. That’s allowed.”
“Don’t be funny. I’m apologizing.” She was crying all over her crown. “You came home in a brace, and we sent you a casserole.”
“It was a good casserole.”
“Stephanie.”
So I let her. She held my face in both her hands and cried, and I cried too, in front of everybody, on a wet patio with bourbon soaked into the knee of my jeans. It took twenty-one years to get there. It took about four minutes once I did.
When she let go, she pushed the dish back into my hands.
“November,” she said. “Full.”
Wendell came over when we were done. He had a spoon from the food table.
“You said save a Marine a spoon,” he said.
“It’s half gone. Missy got to it.”
“I’ll take half.”
He ate it standing up, with his eyes shut. I don’t know what twenty-one years does to banana pudding, but it can’t have hurt it.
“Chris talked about you every Friday at the Post,” he said. “His Army niece. Tougher than any of us, he said, and none of y’all knew it.”
“He was right about the second part.”
“He was right about both.”
He put the spoon back in the dish and stood there a minute with his hands in his pockets.
“Every Veterans Day I stand up at the Post and say two call signs for two girls I never saw,” he said. “I’m going to need her real name.”
“I’ll drive up and say it myself.”
“It’s two hours.”
“I’ve driven farther for worse company.”
He looked over at the gravel where Jason’s truck had been, and he laughed so hard he had to sit back down on the bench.
Laverne stood up. “Now,” she said. “I was promised a picture.”
We went down to the dock in the porch light. Laverne made it the whole way on Wendell’s arm, crown and all. Ryder walked in front with a flashlight from the kitchen drawer.
Halfway down, he dropped back next to me.
“Will you tell me the real one?”
“At Thanksgiving.”
“At the table?”
“At the table,” I said. “No scream.”
He walked a few more steps.
“Did you really fight a man with your hands?”
“Once.”
“Did you win?”
“I came home,” I said.
At the end of the dock Laverne set Christopher’s cap on Ryder’s head. It came down over his eyebrows.
“Hold still,” she told him. “I’m standing up for this one.”
I took it with her phone, then mine. Then she wanted one with Wendell, and Wendell wanted one with Ryder, and Ryder held his hand out for my phone.
He stood right where we’d stood at two o’clock, before any of it, and held the phone up as high as his arm went. Two front teeth gone. The cap down to his eyebrows. Me on one side, Wendell bent down on the other, Laverne’s crown poking into the top of the picture.
“Okay,” Ryder said. “Everybody say Banshee.”
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s spent years sitting quiet at the end of the family table.
Family can make military service part of a story you never meant to share, as in the father who put his uniform on his party invitations. For more family stories with unexpected turns, read about the sister who rallied support for her daughter’s wheelchair and the son who kept a cabin number close.
